Political competition and economic policy: Empirical evidence from Pakistan
Ahmed Chaudhry () and
Ummad Mazhar ()
Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), 2019, vol. 13, No 2019-1, 27 pages
Abstract:
The influence of politics on economic policy is not fully understood. The challenge to ensure political inclusiveness and economic prosperity remains. Perhaps, one way to attain this objective is by increasing political competition. This paper gathers empirical evidence from Pakistan, a country with a checkered political history characterized by episodes of representative, non-representative, and indirectly elected governments. In recent years, the country has witnessed a gradual strengthening of democratic rules with economic progress. Focusing on nine elections held over 1970 to 2015 the authors measure political competition and estimate its impact on economic policy. Contrary to popular conceptions about Pakistan's economy, they find a positive association between lack of political competition and poor economic policy. This finding holds at national as well as subnational levels in Pakistan and withstands a number of robustness tests.
Keywords: political competition; Pakistan; economic policy; economic performance; subnational (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H21 H24 H31 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2019-1
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/190994/1/1045799416.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifweej:20191
DOI: 10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2019-1
Access Statistics for this article
Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020) is currently edited by Dennis J. Snower
More articles in Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020) from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().